The Laughlin plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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90° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 89° in 2016.
Laughlin’s center stands about 740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 490 ft to 1,860 ft, a difference of 1,370 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Spirit Mountain, about 5,580 ft, 11 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium, undifferentiated (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, 0.8 to 3 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Laughlin reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado: about 360 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Laughlin; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Laughlin has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 111° in July; winter nights fall to about 44° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Laughlin normally reaches 75° and falls to 51°. The record high is 88°, in 1999; the record low 35°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Bullhead City, 3 miles east, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
